Remembering the Life of Dr. Gregory Maskarinec

We are sad to announce that Gregory Maskarinec, affiliate faculty in the Center for South Asian Studies and Professor in the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM), passed away at home on June 16, 2022 at the age of 71.

Professor Maskarinec was an anthropologist who began his career as a math teacher for the Peace Corps in Nepal, and worked alongside Dalit shamans of Western Nepal to bring their oral texts into printed volumes with English translation. Before he could get funding to produce the volumes he and the shamans wanted to produce, he found, he needed to get a PhD. So he did, from UH Mānoa, publishing his dissertation as his first book, The Rulings of the Night: An Ethnography of Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). He published two volumes of Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts with line-by-line translation, the first focusing on shamans from Jajarkot (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the second on the Bhuji Valley (Harvard University Press, 2009) with accompanying audiovisual recordings of the oral texts in performance. In addition, he published multiple articles on aspects of shaman traditions in Nepal.

As an anthropologist working in the departments of Family Medicine and Community Health and Native Hawaiian Health, he was an advocate of indigenous medicine, and expanded his research interests to the Pacific islands, especially to Chuuk, Yap, and Palau. He had recently been appointed Director of Global Health and International Medicine.He remained close to Nepal, maintained research interests there, and visited often.

In his honor and memory, JABSOM has published an excerpt from a recent interview Professor Maskarinec gave to the Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, in which he describes his life in his own words. Illustrated with photos shared by his wife Gertraud Maskarinec, this account of a life well lived is well worth reading.

On July 26, 2022, Nepali research institute Martin Chautari held a session of their weekly Health Policy Discussion Series in memory of Professor Maskarinec. Colleagues who spoke included anthropologist Professor Man Bahadur Khatri, editor of the Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology; anthropologist Professor Om Gurung; and yoga and naturopathic physician Dr. Pratikshya Pandey. The video recording of the discussion is available on Martin Chautari’s Facebook page.